elpapkiDec 8
Matt Bury

I work in education & I use & recommend #LibreOffice to my students:

No licence fees (great for students on a tight budget),

Forward & backward compatibility with files (so you don't lose access to your own & others' work),

UX that just lets you get on with work/study (no pop-ups, ads, nag-ware),

Really useful plugins, e.g. Zotero connector,

& just a pleasure to use! 🤓

Nov 28 at 12:38amWeb
Show threadPol MalvinasDec 8
@matbury also, knowing it's free (not as in free beer...), and it respects your freedom as a user, is a big plus
Show threadGuitarsophistDec 8
@matbury LibreOffice is great, but I bet most of your students use Google Docs anyway. That is what they are used to.
Show threadJason123santaDec 8
@jredlund @matbury Yeah I went back to google docs after I forgot to save once in OnlyOffice and lost my progress
Show threadMatt BuryDec 8

@jason123santa @jredlund I use GDocs for shared, collaborative docs; most orgs don't support Collabora yet but they will when the EU starts clawing back their digital sovereignty.

However, I find GDocs are really slow, buggy, clunky, & has limited features compared to LibreOffice.

I do a lot of writing so that's important to me.

Show threadJason123santaDec 9

@matbury @jredlund That might happen but for now we have GDocs.

I find it good and actually don't like libreoffice too much. Mostly because in dark mode the icons are hard to see and I want to make it light mode without making the rest of the system light but there is no option.

OnlyOffice has the option to put it into light mode and its good but its not native (electron) and it has no spell check the entire document button. Something office 2000 has.

Show threadMatt BuryDec 9
@jason123santa @jredlund BTW, the European Union is waking up to the issue of digital sovereignty; They're already calculating the one-way cash flows to US big tech, digital dependence on their services, & Washington's exploitation of the vulnerability for economic & political ends. The "digital colonisation" frame isn't hyperbole. See: https://matbury.com/wordpress/index.php/2025/11/01/digital-sovereignty-or-digital-colony-a-wake-up-call-for-europe/
Digital sovereignty or digital colony? A wake-up call for Europe – Matt Bury

Show threadMatt BuryDec 8

@jredlund They use it because that's the way their Chromebooks are designed; It's more difficult to use any of the alternatives - That's Google's "dark patterns" at work.

Pretty much the same as what Microsoft were prosecuted for doing with Windows & Office.